By the time Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 98 percent of non-southern blacks (40 percent of all blacks) were already covered by state-level “fair employment” laws which prohibited labor market discrimination. This paper assesses the impact of fair employment legislation on black workers’ income, unemployment, labor force participation, and occupational and industrial distributions relative to whites using a difference-in-difference-in-difference framework. In general, the fair employment laws adopted in the 1940s appear to have had larger effects than those adopted in the 1950s, and the laws had relatively small effects on the labor market outcomes of black men compared to those of black women.

Previous studies have found that educational differences in mortality are weaker among the elderly. In this study I examine whether either cohort or period effects may have influenced the interpretation of age effects. Six 10-year birth cohorts are followed over 30 years through decennial censuses. Differential survival is inferred from changes in the relative proportions of a cohort in each education category as the cohort ages. In cross-section, younger persons generally show stronger education effects on survival, although this pattern is clearer for women than for men. There is evidence of period effects. Within cohorts, relative survival tends to increase with age.

We have established a large cohort of twins to facilitate studies of the role of genetics and environment in the development of disease. The cohort has been derived from all multiple births occurring in California between 1908-82 (256,616 in total). We report here on our efforts to contact these twins and their completion of a detailed 16 page risk factor questionnaire. Addresses of the individuals were obtained by linking the birth records with the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) roster of licensees. To date this has been completed for twins born between 1908 and 1972 (200,589 individuals). The linkage has revealed 112,468 matches and, because of less complete DMV records in some years, was less successful in older females than in younger females and all males. Over 41,000 twins have participated by completing the questionnaire. Based on estimates of numbers of individuals receiving a questionnaire, we estimate our crude response rate to be between 42.2% and 49.6%, highest among females in their 40s (62.8%). We describe the representativeness of the twins in the original birth cohort, those identified by the linkage, and those completing the questionnaire. Compared to the 1990 resident population of California-born resident singletons, the respondents were of similar age, sex, race and residential distribution (for although we were able to locate fewer older females, they had a higher response rate), but were less likely to have been educated for more than 12 years. We provide a brief synopsis of studies nested within this cohort. We also elucidate our plans for expanding the cohort in the near future.

The relationship between ethnicity and landownership in rural Canada is explored here using the new national sample of the 1901 census developed by the Canadian Families Project. The data offer the first household level comparison of the factors affecting land ownership throughout the country. Multivariate regressions confirm recent findings that ethnicity was a relatively unimportant determinant of the variation in landownership at the national level, although it did have an impact on access to farmland in the West. Like the findings of Darroch and Soltow for Ontario in 1871, the 1901 sample data indicate that life cycle continued to be the most decisive predictor of farm size.

A fundamental task in data analysis is understanding the di erences between several contrasting groups. These groups can represent di erent classes of ob jects, such as male or female students, or the same group over time, e.g. freshman students in 1993 through 1998. We present the problem of mining contrast sets: conjunctions of attributes and values that differ meaningfully in their distribution across groups. We provide a search algorithm for mining contrast sets with pruning rules that drastically reduce the computational complexity. Once the contrast sets are found, we post-process the results to present a subset that are surprising to the user given what we have already shown. We explicitly control the probability of Type I error (false positives) and guarantee a maximum error rate for the entire analysis by using Bonferroni corrections.

Education – as acquired skills and knowledge, as a set of associations, acquaintances, and friends, or as a form of credentials – figures so prominently that it would be rare to find a discussion of most topics of social inquiry-- prestige, employment, fertility, income and poverty, divorce, political participation, or attitudes –that did not include mention of education. Most commonly, education is incorporated in such analyses either using a continuous measure, such as years of education, or ordered discrete categories, distinguishing those with a particular set of credentials with those without. These measures explicitly recognize that educational achievement is an ordered hierarchy, but discussions usually ignore that a given level of education can may vary in how high or low it falls in the hierarchy depending on the age or period considered.

This paper uses census IPUMS data to analyze trends in racial differences in home ownership and housing values and to examine the connection between residential segregation and the housing status of blacks relative to whites. A widening in the ownership gap between 1940 and 1960 is explained largely by the increasing concentration of blacks in central city areas, whereas a narrowing in the ownership gap between 1960 and 1980 is explained only partly by changes in the relative characteristics of the black and white populations. Residential segregation did nor widen the racial gap in home ownership rates in 1940 or 1980, but it did widen the gap in housing values after 1940. (C) 2001 Academic Press.

Over the last one hundred and fifty years, the quantity of formal education provided for most children has risen dramatically. At any time, school enrollment rates have varied substantially across countries, and within countries they have differed by region and family background. We all know that, generally, richer societies have more children at school than poorer societies, and at the level of the individual family, wealthier families are and were more likely to send their children to school, and to send them to school for a longer period, than poor families (e.g. Crafts, 1985). Raising average education levels has long been seen as a means to promote economic development, and reducing income / class / gender barriers to attending school considered as important ways to reduce the incidence of poverty. In this paper, we examine how much schooling was available, and the kinds of children who went to school, in urban Canada at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The high frequency of poverty and single parent households among African Americans has scholars debating: does single-parent households cause poverty, or does poverty lead to high rates of single parent households? This paper extends this debate on the relationship between family structure and economic achievement to Japanese Americans in the post-World War II era.In his 1972 paper, Uhlenberg argued that differences in family structure, in particular the smaller family size, older mothers, and more stable marriages contributed to Japanese American economic success relative to Mexican Americans. However Uhlenberg used 1960 family structure and economic data, when this argument requires data on the family structure a generation before 1960. Using 1940 Census data, I show that the family structure of Japanese and Mexican immigrants was the same in terms of family size and age of mother, with the only difference being in slightly less stability among Mexican American families. Since the economic status and family structure of Japanese and Mexican Americans diverged at the same time, I argue that it is more likely that the improved economic status of Japanese Americans led to changes in family structure.

The modern concept of the wealth of nations emerged by the early twentieth century. Capital embodied in people human capital mattered. The United States led all nations in mass postelementary education during the human-capital century.' The American system of education was shaped by New World endowments and Republican ideology and was characterized by virtues including publicly funded mass education that was open and forgiving, academic yet practical, secular, gender neutral, and funded and controlled by small districts. The American educational template was a remarkable success, but recent educational concerns and policy have redefined some of its 'virtues' as 'vices.'

At the dawn of the twentieth century the industrial giants watched each other cautiously. The British sent high-ranking commissions to the United States and the United States sent similar groups to Britain and Germany. All were looking over their shoulders to see what made for economic greatness and what would ensure supremacy in the future. The two leading economic nations had grown closer in per capita income since 1850 and were fierce competitors in product markets. It was a moment of angst for Britain and one of enormous possibility for the followers.

Chapter one examines voter rationality. Standard agency theory suggests that rational voters will vote to re-elect competent politicians. Further, rational voters should try to filter signal from noise when assessing the competence of their elected agents. This paper measures the extent to which voters separate signal from noise in deciding whether to re-elect their state governors. I find some evidence of sophistication: voters appear to evaluate their state's economic performance relative to the national economy. Yet I also find evidence of irrationality: voters in oil-producing states tend to re-elect incumbents during oil price rises, and dump then when the oil price drops. Similarly, voters in procyclical states are consistently fooled into re-electing incumbents during national booms. I conclude that voters are best characterized as quasi-rational. Chapters two and three turn to the effects of unilateral divorce laws. Chapter two examines whether these laws caused divorce rates to rise. The Coase Theorem suggests that merely redistributing property rights should not change marriage-market allocation. The existing empirical literature disagrees. I revisit this literature showing that these results reflect a failure to jointly consider both the political endogeneity of these divorce laws and the dynamic response of divorce rates to a shock to the political regime. Taking explicit account of the dynamic response of divorce rates, I find that liberalized divorce laws caused a discernible rise in divorce rates for about a decade, but find little evidence of a persistent effect. While unilateral divorce laws have only small effects on marriage-market allocation, chapter three find profound effects on distribution. Suicide rates provide a quantifiable measure of well-being, and we find that female suicide rates fell by about a fifth when states liberalized access to divorce. Domestic violence against women declined by about a third, and intimate homicide rates declined by a tenth, suggesting that these laws improved outcomes for women. Legal institutions appear to have profound effects on outcomes within families.

This dissertation investigates the rise of retirement and the apparent shift in retirement planning strategies in the early twentieth century. I focus on the behavior of Southerners, a population that has not been studied in detail although retirement rates were much lower in the South than the North in this period. To investigate the source of the North-South retirement gap, samples of men living in two Georgia counties in 1910 are linked from the Census to state tax digests and the records of the Georgia Confederate Pension program. A comparison of Union and Confederate veterans reveals that regional characteristics, like race and farm residence, influenced retirement behavior more than military pensions did. Occupational differences also cannot explain the regional retirement gap, since farmers were more likely to retire than nonfarmers. Wealth has a significant effect on the labor force participation of white men, but no effect on black men. This suggests that a large segment of the southern population did not rely on accumulated wealth in retirement, and instead remained in the labor force or relied on family for support. Explaining the apparent change in retirement planning strategies over the twentieth century from relying on children to life-cycle saving requires a reexamination of the theory of the choice among retirement planning strategies. A theory of saving across the life cycle is presented which includes altruistic motives between parents and children. This model provides a more general approach to the theory of retirement planning than previous models, which are based on a non-altruistic bequest motive. Wealth accumulation data are used to estimate the overall prevalence of two possible savings strategies: relying on children or on accumulated savings in retirement. In 1910, there is evidence that income from children was an important component of retirement savings. A possible change in strategies across time is investigated by examining the behavior of synthetic cohorts constructed from the tax digests of 1900, 1910, and 1920. There is little evidence of a transition to the more modern life-cycle saving strategy until 1920.

The majority of U.S. temporary help supply firms (THS) offer nominally free, unrestricted computer skills training, a practice inconsistent with the competitive model of training. I propose and test a model in which firms offer general training to induce self-selection and perform screening of worker ability. The model implies, and the data confirm, that firms providing training attract higher ability workers yet pay them lower wages after training. Thus, beyond providing spot market labor, THS firms sell information about worker quality to their clients. The rapid growth of THS employment suggests that demand for worker screening is rising.